War and Peace

I have been downloading audio books for many years. When alone in my car I seldom listen to music or the news, I am usually listening to the book of the week. I always travel with 10 to 15 novels at my side, ready to listen at a moments notice. These are legally downloaded from the Hamilton Public Library, not some file sharing deal. I have been able to listen to most of the books I’ve ever wanted to read, including most, if not all of Charles Dickens, most, if not all of Jane Austin plus a ton of unknown mystery books, “who done it’s” that have been available to me.
I believe most libraries provide such a service and while in the beginning they didn't provide books that would work with IPods, now they have a variety of formats which will work. I choose to use a Creative Zen, my second one, and I keep music on my IPOD. I listen when ever I’m alone in the car, and I take the player in with me when I'm eating lunch alone, and use earbuds. I always am delighted to eat and listen and it makes for better company than many lunches I’ve shared.

I have listened to James Joyce’s “Ulysses”, all 32 hours of it. After owning the book for more than 30 years, I finally got to hear it. I still read books, and usually fall asleep every night with a book in hand.

All this makes me remember my days and nights as a kid listening to the radio. Usually it was variety, but there were the stories, the mysteries, the sitcoms. I would wait almost religiously for my nightly special programs I heard on a radio in our kitchen. This was during the 40’s and early 50’s and it was radio’s hey day for me, even though radio was waning at the time. I would still listen even after we bought our first TV in 1952, because there were not yet many programs I wanted to see, but I could get lost easily in radio reality.

Now, my listening days have returned. I love road trips for just this reason. If I have to drive long distances I seldom notice because I’m listening. I can remember driving to Washington D.C. in 2009, by myself, a ten hour trip, and listening to two different books, one each way. I use an FM broadcaster plugged into a car electrical connection to broadcast through my radio.

Last night I started to download Tolstoy’s “War and Peace”. I had forgotten about it and when I ran across it I smiled. Will I ever listen to it, who knows? I’d like to think I will. It was however a daunting challenge. I started to download and realized the book takes 60 hours and 11 minutes to present, so the download time is significant, And sometimes there are internet hiccups.

I started the download pretty late and as it was going I was getting sleepy. Along about the 18th part (it downloads in pieces, not quite chapters but all about and hour plus in length) I was too tired to continue so I shut it off figuring I’d go back. This morning I started it up and let it run and went about my business. My wife got on the computer and told me there was a problem on #23 and she didn’t know what to do. I, of course, had forgotten all about it by then and was surprised. I went down and loaded #23 and continued. I let it load all 54 sections and I am sated!

I have about 6 or 7 new novels to add, including War and Peace, and I have to finish the novel I’m listening to or get to the end of a section so I can add and get back to where I was. I have to do all this before they expire because the downside of library downloading is the books self destruct in the computer after 14 days. You must remove them to a device or burn them on a disk in order not to destruct. They don’t hurt your computer, they simply cease to work.

They have just added “Play aways”. To the library collections, which are flash memory books, small as a cassette, where you provide the battery and the earbuds and you can take them out for a normal library leaning period.

Lord knows, I may get “War and Peace” loaded onto my MP3 player and get it listened to before I became too old to remember how to work all this equipment.